In between my daily experiments, I checked out my Facebook (a great tool for networking and also not-working), there I stumbled upon Merlyna’s post about utilitarian view. I guess it would nice to share the topic with you all in my network (partially copy-pasted with her permission). More about Merlyna: www.merlyna.org – I envy the way she tells complicated phenomenon extremely articulate, clear and understandable.

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ON THE UTILITARIANISM

In yesterday’s class, I was lecturing on four approaches in dealing with distributive justice of science and technology policy, namely: utilitarian, libertarian, (John) Rawl’s contractarian, and communitarian. Of course I talked more about the dominant, if implicit, distributional framework of ST policy, which is utilitarian one, with the reading from Cozzens. We know that in the utilitarian view, a distributional system is justified as long as it increases total happiness for the group, not among the individuals. Utilitarianists argue that what they advocate contributes to economic growth and the solution of major societal problems, and then let other areas of policy (social one) worry about whether the benefits are distributed equally or not, or whether everybody get benefit or not — they ‘grow the pie’ someone else cuts it.

In the class, I gave a very blunt example, if I threw 100 slices of pizza to everybody, around 25 students, total happiness of class is positive. The class is happy, rather than not having pizza at all, or if just 10 slices pizza. Then, if I were a utilitarian, if there were some who got 7 slices and others got only 1 or 2, that’s not my problem. At least they got pizza, right?

Yeah yeah…. but, let me talk straight here…. that “at least they got pizza” attitude is a problem, a real problem.

The problem is what’s at the heart of utilitarian view is wealth creation, not equalities. There is no explicit mechanism to make sure that both the wealthy and the poor share the benefits. And the increasing market orientation makes it more likely that the affluence will benefit more than the poor.

On a more pragmatic note, utilitarianists with their implicit distributional ethic do share view with many, or even most, who believe that economic growth is always good and bring benefits from everyone, through “trickle down”. While unequal, nevertheless everybody get benefits. Indeed, economic growth on national level does almost always help the poor.

The problem of course it keeps sanctioning society with growing inequalities. And in the end, inequalities not only hurt the poor, but also hurt the wealthy ones, hurt the system (e.g. increased crime rate hurts the whole neighborhood). Utilitarian works to a certain degree and certainly works to boost economic growth, but it opens up a big hole for problems. And certainly, without enforcing regulations the system would run wild. Pure utilitarianism + deregulation = a big mess. There’s no mechanism to correct the imbalance without regulation.

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